Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society. In its earliest days, it was a private venture of the Royal Society's secretary. It was established in 1665, making it the second journal in the world exclusively devoted to science, was edited and published by the Royal Society's first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, four-and-a-half years after the society was founded. The full title of the journal, as given by Oldenburg, was "Philosophical Transactions, Giving some of the present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in many considerable parts of the World". The society's council minutes dated 1 March 1664 (in the Old Style calendar; equivalent to 11 March 1665 in the modern New Style calendar) ordered that "the Philosophical Transactions, to be composed by Mr Oldenburg, be printed the first Monday of every month, if he have sufficient matter for it, and that that tract be licensed by the Council of this Society, being first revised by some Members of the same". Oldenburg published the journal at his own personal expense and seems to have entered into an agreement with the society's council allowing him to keep any resulting profits. He was to be disappointed, however, since the journal performed poorly from a financial point of view during his lifetime, just about covering the rent on his house in Piccadilly. Oldenburg put out 136 issues of the Transactions before his death in 1677.

[24 November 1664] "We must be very careful as well of regist'ring the person and time of any new matter, as the matter itselfe, whereby the honor of the invention will be reliably preserved to all posterity" (registration and archiving)
[3 December 1664] "...all ingenious men will thereby be incouraged to impact their knowledge and discoverys" (dissemination)
The council minutes of 1 March 1665 made provisions for the tract to be revised by members of the council of the Royal Society, providing the framework for peer review to eventually develop, becoming fully systematic as a process by the 1830s.

The printed journal replaced much of Oldenburg's letter-writing to correspondents, at least on scientific matters, and as such can be seen as a labour-saving device. Oldenburg also described his journal as "one of these philosophical commonplace books", indicating his intention to produce a collective notebook between scientists. Over the years the form of the contributions to the journal evolved as part of the changing expectations for persuasive scientific claims and the changing roles of scientists with respect to publication.

Issue 1 contained such articles as: an account of the improvement of optic glasses; the first report on the Great Red Spot of Jupiter; a prediction on the motion of a recent comet (probably an Oort cloud object); a review of Robert Boyle's Experimental History of Cold; Robert Boyle's own report of a deformed calf; "A report of a peculiar lead-ore from Germany, and the use thereof"; "Of an Hungarian Bolus, of the Same Effect with the Bolus Armenus"; "Of the New American Whale-Fishing about the Bermudas", and "A Narrative Concerning the Success of Pendulum-Watches at Sea for the Longitudes". The final article of the issue concerned "The Character, Lately Published beyond the Seas, of an Eminent Person, not Long Since Dead at Tholouse, Where He Was a Councellor of Parliament". The eminent person in question was Pierre de Fermat, although the issue failed to mention his last theorem. In the first year of the journal, also the formula for determining the year of the Julian Period, given its character involving three four-digit numbers, was published by Jacques de Billy.

Oldenburg referred to himself as the "compiler" and sometimes "Author" of the Transactions, and always claimed that the journal was entirely his sole enterprise—although with the society's imprimatur and containing reports on experiments carried out and initially communicated by of many of its Fellows, many readers saw the journal as an official organ of the society.

Eighteenth century

thumb|[[Hans Sloane by Stephen Slaughter, 1736]]

By the mid-eighteenth century, the most notable editors, besides Oldenburg, were Hans Sloane, James Jurin and Cromwell Mortimer.

After the takeover of the journal by the Royal Society, management decisions including negotiating with printers and booksellers, were still the task of one of the secretaries—but editorial control was exercised through the Committee of Papers. The committee mostly based its judgements on which papers to publish and which to decline on the 300 to 500-word abstracts of papers read during its weekly meetings. But the members could, if they desired, consult the original paper in full.

Nineteenth century

Transactions continued steadily through the turn of the century and into the 1820s. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, a movement to reform the Royal Society rose. The reformers felt that the scientific character of the society had been undermined by the admission of too many gentleman dilettantes under Banks. In proposing a more limited membership, to protect the society's reputation, they also argued for systematic, expert evaluation of papers for Transactions by named referees.

Sectional Committees, each with responsibility for a particular group of disciplines, were initially set up in the 1830s to adjudicate the award of George IV's Royal Medals. But individual members of these committees were soon put to work reporting on and evaluating papers submitted to the Royal Society. These evaluations began to be used as the basis of recommendations to the Committee of Papers, who would then rubber-stamp decisions made by the Sectional Committees. Despite its flaws—it was inconsistent in its application and not free of abuses—this system remained at the heart of the society's procedures for publishing until 1847 when the Sectional Committees were dissolved. However, the practice of sending most papers out for review remained.

As the twentieth century came to a close, the editing of the Transactions and the society's other journals became more professional with the employment of a growing in-house staff of editors, designers and marketers. In 1968 there were about eleven staff in the Publishing Section; by 1990, the number had risen to twenty-two. The editorial processes were also transformed. In 1968 the Sectional Committees had been abolished (again). Instead, the secretaries, Harrie Massey (physicist) and Bernard Katz (physiologist), were each assigned a group of Fellows to act as associate editors for each series ("A" and "B") of the Transactions. The role of the Committee of Papers was abolished in 1989 and since 1990 two Fellows (rather than the secretaries) have acted as the editors with assistance from associate editors. The editors serve on the Publishing Board, established in 1997 to monitor publishing and report to the council. In the 1990s, as these changes to the publishing and editorial teams were implemented, the Publishing Section acquired its first computer for administration; the Transactions were first published online in 1997. (1672) can be seen as the beginning of his public scientific career.

| Anton van Leeuwenhoek || Leeuwenhoek's 1677 paper, the famous 'letter on the protozoa', gives the first detailed description of protists and bacteria living in a range of environments, sent by the author in a Dutch letter of the 9 Octob. 1676 concerning little animals by him observed in rain-well-sea and snow water; as also in water wherein pepper had lain infused.

| Benjamin Franklin || The American statesman was the sole or co-author of 19 papers in Philosophical Transactions, including an experiment on the calming effects of oil on water (of great significance to current scientific fields including surface chemistry and physics, and self-assembly) carried out on a Clapham Common pond. But his reputation was cemented by his "Philadelphia Experiment", A Letter of Benjamin Franklin, Esq; to Mr. Peter Collinson, F. R. S. concerning an Electrical Kite – recognized as one of the most famous scientific experiments of all time – and published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1753. He later founded the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, closely modelled on the Royal Society.

| William Roy || Between 1747 and 1755, William Roy organised and carried out an innovative Military Survey of Scotland. He then gained military rank, and throughout his career promoted extending this to a survey triangulation of the whole of Britain. In the 1780s Major General William Roy measured the distance between the Greenwich and Paris observatories, promoting a method of triangulation and instruments designed and built by Jesse Ramsden. This work led to much more accurate records of longitudes for both the British and French – remarkable during a century of near-constant warfare between the two nations. The work was written up in three papers in Philosophical Transactions, culminating in a 1790 publication, An Account of the Trigonometrical Operation, Whereby the Distance between the Meridians of the Royal Observatories of Greenwich and Paris Has Been Determined (with Isaac Dalby). While, like most English maps at the time, the prime meridian is centred on St Paul's cathedral (a system the vestiges of which can be found in the naming of the British road network), Roy's figure showing the triangulation of major distances between England and France takes Greenwich as the prime meridian. While this had been suggested before, notably by Edmund Halley in 1710, this was one of the first major works to take Greenwich as prime meridian, anticipating its status as the universal prime meridian. Roy's work in Philosophical Transactions led to the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain.

| Caroline Herschel || The first paper by a woman in the journal, An account of a new comet appeared in 1787. Caroline Herschel was paid a salary of £50 per annum by the King to work with her brother William Herschel as an astronomer – unusual at a time when most who worked in astronomy or science did so without pay, regardless of gender

| Mary Somerville || On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Rays was one of two papers submitted to Philosophical Transactions by the Scottish polymath, translator of Laplace and friend of J. M. W. Turner. In it, she communicates her finding that the ultraviolet components of the electromagnetic spectrum could magnetize a steel needle. While subsequent experiments were not able to reproduce this finding, leading Somerville to retract her claim (exactly in accordance with what would be expected of a scientist today), her reputation was secured. In some ways, her hypothesis remarkably prescient: the photoelectric effect is more likely to occur when metals are irradiated by light at the violet end of the spectrum.

| Charles Darwin || Darwin's only paper in Philosophical Transactions, the snappily titled Observations on the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy, and of Other Parts of Lochaber in Scotland, with an Attempt to Prove That They Are of Marine Origin (1837) describes parallel lines cut horizontally across the hillsides of Glen Roy, and proposes that they had marine origins as had similar features he had seen at Coquimbo in Chile while on the Beagle expedition. In 1840 the lines were explained by French geologist Louis Agassiz as due to a lake formed in an ice age. After many years of argument, Darwin conceded in 1862 that his paper was "one long gigantic blunder". In his autobiography, Darwin claims, "This paper was a great failure, and I am ashamed of it."

| Michael Faraday || Publishing over 40 papers in the journal, Faraday rose from a fairly humble background to become a world-famous and highly respected scientist. His final paper in the journal, which was given as the Bakerian Lecture in 1857, Experimental Relations of Gold (and Other Metals) to Light, introduced the idea of metal particles that were smaller than the wavelength of light – colloidal sols or what would now be called nanoparticles.

| James Clerk Maxwell || In On the Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865) Maxwell described how electricity and magnetism could travel as a wave and inferred from the velocity given by the wave equation, and by known experimental determinations of the speed of light, that light was an electromagnetic wave.

| Kathleen Lonsdale || Lonsdale's work carried out at the Royal Institution led to 17 papers in Royal Society journals, two of which were in Philosophical Transactions. Like many notable figures in the 'new sciences' of structural and cell biology, and also the new physics (which included Paul Dirac), she published the bulk of her work in the more regular Proceedings of the Royal Society. Her 1947 paper, Divergent-Beam X-Ray Photography of Crystals, built on earlier work to show how this nuanced technique could reveal information about the purity and degree of 'perfection' of a crystal.

| Dorothy Hodgkin || Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin's record of publishing in Royal Society journals spanned 50 years, beginning in 1938. Out of 20 papers, only two were published in Philosophical Transactions, the first in 1940, when she was still called Dorothy Crowfoot and was working with JD Bernal. The second, in 1988, was her final publication in a Royal Society journal. Hodgkin used advanced techniques to crystallize proteins, allowing their structures to be elucidated by X-ray crystallography, including Vitamin B-12 and insulin

| Alan Turing || Turing's 1952 paper, On the Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, gave a chemical and physical basis for many of the patterns and forms found in nature, a year before the structure of DNA was reported by Watson and Crick, who published their initial findings in Nature and subsequently published an expanded version in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, another of the Royal Society's journals. In his paper, Turing coins the term morphogen, which is now used in the sciences of developmental biology and epigenetics, to denote a chemical species that modulates the growth of a species.

| Stephen Hawking || A 1983 paper The Cosmological Constant was actually Hawking's seventh in a Royal Society journal, but his first in Philosophical Transactions (all the others appeared in Proceedings). The paper was first presented at a themed meeting at the Royal Society, providing a model for the journal's content that continues to this day (unlike Proceedings, which publishes new research on any scientific subject, divided along the physical and life sciences, Philosophical Transactions is now always themed and roughly half of the time taken from open 'discussion' meetings at the society's headquarters in London, which are free to attend). The meeting in this instance also featured papers given by future Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society Martin Rees, then-recent Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, future winners of Royal Society premier medals Chris Llewellyn Smith and John Ellis, and Michael Faraday Prize winner and popular science author John D Barrow.

Public domain and access

In July 2011 programmer Greg Maxwell released through The Pirate Bay the nearly 19,000 articles that had been published before 1923 and were therefore in the public domain in the United States, to support Aaron Swartz in his case. The articles had been digitized for the Royal Society by JSTOR for a cost of less than US$100,000 and public access to them was restricted through a paywall.

In August 2011, users uploaded over 18,500 articles to the collections of the Internet Archive. The collection received 50,000 views per month by November 2011.

In October of the same year, the Royal Society released for free the full text of all its articles prior to 1941 but denied that this decision had been influenced by Maxwell's actions.

Literary references

The protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" alludes to the older editions of the Philosophical Transactions, comparing them to the occult writings of earlier natural philosophers:

The journal is also mentioned by the narrator in Chapter 6 of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

References

External links

'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 1–177 (1665–1886), and index of vol. 1–70 (1665–1780) in Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL)
List of freely accessible online archives that have the Transactions, Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania
Henry Oldenburg's copy of vol I & II of Philosophical Transactions, manuscript note on a flyleaf, a receipt signed by the Royal Society's printer: "Rec. October 18th 1669 from Mr Oldenburgh Eighteen shillings for this voll: of Transactions by me John Martyn".